Bad Kids
by Gutter Dreams
Summary: The relationship between Jericho and the Lone Wanderer is a little less than healthy. What does it matter in a world like this. [one-shot]


The toxic smoke billowing from his cigarette and throat was choking her lungs as it lingered in the enclosed space of the metal corridor. She thought she'd be use to the fumes by now, seeing as how he fumbled at his back pocket for a smoke every time they stopped moving for even two seconds. She had just paused to rifle through the decaying backpack they'd snatched up from the old schoolhouse way back when, and sure enough his grimy fingers scrambled for a beaten up cigarette pack and a lighter. A beaten up cigarette pack that _she'd_ given him, no less.

"Christ..." she muttered, shoving a loaded magazine into her empty assault rifle before yanking the zipper of the bag closed. "Give it a rest, will ya?"

He barely gave her a glance or an indication he'd heard her, keeping his eyes trained for any movement down the corridor while he sucked down carcinogens. 'At least he's good for a watchdog,' she told herself, shrugging the limp bag over her Regulator duster, long since stripped from some poor fool whose brain was now rotting in chunks meters away from his lifeless body at the Northwest Seneca station. The only reason she still wore the foul, bloodstained thing was solely for the pants-shitting looks on their faces when more of those "peacekeepers" came for her.

Successfully restocked, she nabbed the cancer stick from between Jericho's chapped lips as she stepped by him and tossed it over her shoulder. Ash collected in a small pile where it hit the metal and continued to burn against the floor.

She aimed down her sights as she crept around through one of the open doors of the hallway until Jericho took a long stride beside her and slapped his palm against the bottom of her gun, slamming the top of the metal rifle into her face.

"Fuck!" she cursed, stumbling and clutching at her throbbing nose, almost dropping her rifle. "Fucking dick!"

Jericho had scanned the empty room and was already ripping open drawers. "They're expensive, kid," he said, pocketing a handful of bottle caps from a drawer. "And hard to find."

"You're gonna kill yourself," she spat, flustered and irritated. That didn't happen. He didn't touch her. She was the boss in this partnership and he was the follower. She wiped at her aching nose and her watering eyes.

"I'm gonna die either way," he told her with a humorless smile, stepping behind her to shove a gun magazine into the pack dangling off her shoulders before walking back to the hallway and plucking up the still lit cigarette from the dirty floor.

The smoke stung her nose.

* * *

"I can't," he huffed breathlessly, bending over to press his hands against his knees, "we gotta stop for a bit."

Filthy, green clouds glared down at the pair as he slide to the ground with his back against a boulder and she danced anxiously on the tips of her toes. A pale sun stared her in the face.

"The sun's going down," she said to the dusty rock she was kicking back and forth with restless feet.

"Yeah, I know," Jericho snapped. The back of his skull rested on the stone and his tired eyes were closed. The oxygen chugging through his weak lungs was audible in the thick air.

'If he was once a strong, young man,' she thought, drinking up his rough appearance from a few feet away, 'he's certainly a long way from that now.'

Her heart and muscles were still alive with pounding adrenaline, her mind still sharply focused on getting their job done. She ached to shoot something.

"Damn..." she murmured, running her dirty fingers through her dirty hair. This wasn't an uncommon occurrence. It was drilled into her muscle memory to slow her jog to Jericho's comfortable speed. It was normal for his rasping demands of slowing down to float to her ears in the middle of the wasteland. It was never any less annoying, though, and he knew this.

"I ain't gotta stick around, you know," he growled. When she looked to him, his bloodshot eyes were now open and met hers in determination. "Just tell me to piss off, and I'll piss off."

She stretched her arms to the graying sky and sighed out her exasperation. Her teeth hurt from not talking enough today. Their backpack slipped from her willing shoulders, and she tossed it in Jericho's direction with the hand that wasn't cradling her gun. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.

"I'll take first watch."

* * *

The clouds cried on them one morning, while camping on the edge of some abandoned ghost town. She had been oddly cautious of dashing in during the night and risking being overpowered by savage raiders. Jericho's insisting that if a large number of raiders were here he'd know, that he'd know just by looking at the size of the dingy town, fell on deaf ears. Usually she would be the first to jump at the suggestion of slitting raiders' throats in their sleep, with bright blood lust invading her eyes. Instead, she had hunkered down by a pile of rumble and quietly curled into a tight ball.

They switched four times in the darkness; each one just as agitated and sick when the other gave them a rough shake and told them it was their time for the chopping block. Now, as faint, dull light started to color the clouds, Jericho was slumped on the ground, droopy-eyed and cross-legged and balancing a heavy shotgun on his legs.

The first spot of liquid he felt on his cheek, and the next on his hand. He turned and gave his partner a firm smack on the arm, already starting to push himself to his sore feet.

"C'mon, kid. Time to get a move on."

She remained an immobile slug against the earth. Infected rain started to drizzle down from infected clouds, and Jericho could hear the machine on her arm start to rapidly tick at rising radiation levels.

"Fucking move," he grumbled, grabbing her arm and yanking her tense body up. She flailed and stumbled but righted herself on her feet soon enough and leaned over shakily to grab her backpack. She was silent and wound like a spring, jerky and stiff in movement. Her short brown hair was starting to flatten and stick to her face, heavy with rain.

He almost had to carry her shuffling form into the nearest crumbling house, and the instant he slammed the door shut, her wet body collapsed onto an old, moldy sofa.

"What the hell's wrong with you? Are you hurt?" he demanded to know, hurrying to the sofa and pushing her over onto her stomach so he could peel the backpack away from her. There was a grimace blooming on her face, and she gnawed harshly at her bottom lip, unresponsive.

While his numb hands dug for a stimpak, she rolled back over onto her back and threw her legs up suddenly, hugging them tight to her chest and letting out a sharp whine like a dying dog.

"Urgh..." she groaned high in her throat, wrapping her hand around Jericho's as it neared to administer the stimpak and digging her jagged nails into his flesh. "Go away..."

"What the fuck's matter with you?!" he snarled, ripping his arm away from her clawing grasp.

She groaned again, pressed her face into the dirty cushion beside her, and whimpered out, "Girl pains..."

Silence fell over the house, apart from her occasional gasps and groans, and in a few minutes, as soon as the rain stopped, Jericho stomped out to go slaughter some lingering, nearby raiders, slice up their softest clothes, and carry back strips of cloth to the crumbling house on the corner.

* * *

"You're my girl," he'd told her once, and she didn't believe him.

They had made a very necessary stop in Rivet City to stock up on supplies and rest. Megaton would have been closer and more convenient, but Megaton was still an irradiated, lifeless dent on the surface of the earth.

Flak and Shrapnel were all smiles and enthusiasm when they spotted her thin form walking their way. Jericho stayed at a safe distance and wandered off towards Gary's Galley for a quick bite and a drink. Conversations about guns between those three would last for days if the market had no closing time and they all had nothing better to do.

He parked his behind on an empty stool and soon Angela hurried behind the counter to ask what he wanted. She always stayed a few steps back from him and had a weary look on her pretty face. It made him want to force her against a wall and slur dirty things in her ear. She was a smart young lady to always stay a few steps back from him. At least her numbnuts father was nowhere to be seen.

After wolfing down three stale mirelurk cakes, he sipped at a whiskey and spared a few glances over towards Flak and Shrapnel's. A few minutes passed and the contents of a second whiskey bottle passed, and soon he simply committed himself to blatantly staring.

She was resting her elbows on the counter, bent over, nodding and closely inspecting a gun while Flak leaned over from behind the counter and talked with his hands. Jericho's lazy eyes rolled around the rest of the market. The sun was fading, and people were starting to clear out, little by little: packing up shops and packing up the goods they'd bought and carting them away to their confined rooms within the rusting ship. Jericho ordered another numbing drink.

A young guard was hovering near the gun shop, and with good reason, as many thieves preferred to make their move at this time of evening. Jericho sized the man up; he was young and thin, holding his gun like he didn't have a clue which side was the barrel and which side was the butt.

The young man was eyeing the kid up like there was no tomorrow, by the looks of it. There was no denying that he was lingering a little too long, taking a little too much pleasure from pacing back and forth behind her bent form and gazing to his manhood's content. Jericho's careless arm knocked over the empty whiskey glasses as he pushed himself off the stool and made an immediate beeline for the guard. The shatter of breaking glass behind him didn't even reach his burning ears.

One hard swing and the punk was out cold. The kid had spun around, shocked, outraged, and confused, while Flak and Shrapnel stepped forward and Harkness came running. Her hasty excuses of he's drunk, it was just a misunderstanding, we were leaving soon away were like white noise to his brain. He spat on the guard's face and would have done worse, but she was clutching his arm and dragging him away, yelling out apologies to Harkness, Flak, and Shrapnel all in the same stuttering breath. Angela stood rubbernecking in the safety of the Galley, hugging an empty food tray to her chest.

The blow of her palm hitting his cheek rung off the walls of the stairwell. "Are you insane?!" Her voice still buzzed like white noise. Her face was all scrunched up like it was when she had helplessly watched her old man die on the other side of a thick pane of glass. She was pissed.

"You're my girl," he'd slurred, trying in vain to focus on her eyes, but he ended up gazing at the worn earring on her upper earlobe.

She'd slapped him three more times by the time they made it up to the Weatherly Hotel.

* * *

Days like these, when the fading sun actually managed to peek through the green clouds and there was nothing pressing on their list of things to do, were lazy days. They were careless killing, stealing, plundering days. Idle hands certainly were the devil's playthings.

Five caves in two hours. Raiders occupied some and others were havens for homeless wanderers and the rest could have been poor souls that wandered off and just got lost, but by the time they were trekking their way back towards the exit of the fifth, she was hauling a backpack that almost burst at the seams with smile on her lips and drying blood on her duster. She kept one hand on the strap and one hand on the trigger of a shotgun.

Jericho walked ahead of her on patrol duty. The kid lived for this kind of stuff, he knew. No activity seemed to make her heart beat more than storming into some inhabited place where they didn't belong and laying waste to it. He understood exactly, because he lived for it too.

"Do you remember- ha ha... the look on that bitch's face!" She was jabbering away like a child with a handful of candy behind him, excitement and adrenaline saturating her voice.

It made him feel young and reckless again to listen to her. "Ha. I swore I saw the whore piss herself."

Her shrill laughter tickled his ears as he rounded a corner and was greeted by the light of day slithering through an opening in the rock a few meters away, marking the exit.

A sudden shuffling close by alarmed him, and there was the panting of a voice - two voices. The desperate huffing and gasps of humans struggling like scrapyard dogs. He turned as quick as he could on his feet and met with the sight of his girl being assaulted by a man; he must have heard the boom of their guns slaughtering the rest of his companions and decided to lay in wait near the exit to extract revenge. There was a flimsy knife in his shaking hand and tear streaks burning paths through the dirt on his cheek. He couldn't have been more than sixteen years old.

Jericho didn't move another inch. The kid had him by the throat and shoved him back against the rock wall, slamming the butt of her shotgun into his skull. He fell, the knife slipping from his grip, and when he scrambled to grab it again, she drove her boot down hard onto the back of his hand. He yelped like wounded animal. Words spewed: pleads for life and begs for mercy and stuttered curses and childish name-calling and demands to know what had happened to his family. She was silent, the backpack limp on the rock where she had thrown it in instinct to hide the valuables from immediate damage, and she steadied her shotgun with two hands.

She was leaning down close, and so most of it splattered on the front of her already filthy duster. Bloody, hairy clumps of his skull thudded down onto her shoes. She wiped them off on his pants and crouched down to go through his tattered pockets. When she angled her head up towards Jericho, there was a splotch of fresh blood staining her cheek. She tossed a pack of cigarettes up that he caught with quick hands.

"Nice shootin', kid," he said, his voice echoing in the tight enclosure as he pocketed the cigarettes and she gathered the backpack. Dark blood was seeping towards him on the dirty cave floor and the boy's brains were dripping down the front of her jacket and he'd never desired to be closer to a person more in his entire life.

"Stop that," she demanded, stepping close and handing out the backpack to him with a straining arm. He easily shouldered the loaded bag where she could barely lift it. Bottle caps jingled inside. "Call me Sarah already." She could see tiny, sprouting hairs on his unshaven chin, and he reeked of smoke and rotting liquor this close up. It stung her nose.

"Not a chance, kid," he told her with a smirk, reveling in the infuriated scowl that marred her face.

She shoved her hand into his back pocket, where she knew he kept a fresh pack and yanked it out. Cigarettes tumbled to the bloody ground, and she smeared them into mush with her foot. She leaned in dangerously close and, when she breathed poison into his face, she could see it reflected back in his dark eyes. Blood silently embraced the bottoms of their shoes.

His chuckling form turned its back on her as he ducked out of the cave and into the sweltering heat of the diseased sunlight.

She followed with a pocket full of shotgun shells, a mind full of jumbled turmoil, and lips full of old smoke and liquor. She didn't wipe the young boy's drying blood from her face because she knew he liked the sight of it there.


End file.
